Birthmark
"The Birth-mark" is at once a fascinating study of monomania and its potentially gothic implications for domestic relations, and yet the third reason for the continued critical interest in this short story has more to do with its representation of literary production. Once again, the shape of the birthmark is significant. Hawthorne's narrator and the characters in the story tirelessly call attention to the fact that the birthmark is in the shape of a hand. Aylmer is a scientist, but he is also, quite literally, a writer, an "author" whose volume "rich with achievements . . . was yet as melancholy a record as ever mortal hand had penned" (p. 775). Georgiana reads his works, which are testimonies of failure, presaging her own demise. Whereas the scientist-author does not foresee the consequences of his experiments, the unlike-liest character in the story does. That is Aminadab, Aylmer's "under-worker," who "seemed to represent man's physical nature." A fully embodied creature with "vast strength" and "indescribable earthiness," he understands how Aylmer's attacks on Georgiana's body spell doom. He remarks, "If she were my wife, I'd never part with that birth-mark" (p. 770). Aminadab comprehends the inextricability of Georgiana and her mark. To marry her is, on some level, to marry the birthmark. To divorce her from her mark is to kill her.
Aylmer is an author figure who reads "the fairy-sign manual" of the birthmark as evidence of his own need to write an even better manual, presumably one with no marks. And one with no women. In attempting to erase the hand on Georgiana's cheek, Aylmer wants to re-create Georgiana, only this time immaculately. There will be no reproduction, with its blood and messiness, but only production, with its calculation and rationality. What issues from this logic, which Mary Shelley had examined only twelve years before, is a model of male creation, dependent upon though deadly to the female body. Aylmer becomes, like so many of...
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